d351235422 Smiths specialty is the tomato, however, and over the course of many scholarly articles and booksThe History of Home-Made Anglo-American Tomato Ketchup, for Petits Propos Culinaires, for example, and The Great Tomato Pill War of the 1830s, for The Connecticut Historical Society BulletinSmith has argued that some critical portion of the history of culinary civilization could be told through this fruit.Cortez brought tomatoes to Europe from the New World, and they inexorably insinuated themselves into the worlds cuisines.The Italians substituted the tomato for eggplant.In northern India, it went into curries and chutneys.The biggest tomato producer in the world today? Smith paused, for dramatic effect.China.You dont think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine, and it wasnt ten years ago.But it is now.Smith dipped one of my French fries into the homemade sauce.It has that raw taste, he said, with a look of intense concentration.Its fresh ketchup.You can taste the tomato.Ketchup was, to his mind, the most nearly perfect of all the tomatos manifestations.It was inexpensive, which meant that it had a firm lock on the mass market, and it was a condiment, not an ingredient, which meant that it could be applied at the discretion of the food eater, not the food preparer.Theres a quote from Elizabeth Rozin Ive always loved, he said.Rozin is the food theorist who wrote the essay Ketchup and the Collective Unconscious, and Smith used her conclusion as the epigraph of his ketchup book: ketchup may well be the only true culinary expression of the melting pot, and ...its special and unprecedented ability to provide something for everyone makes it the Esperanto of cuisine.Here is where Henry Heinz and the benzoate battle were so important: in defeating the condiment Old Guard, he was the one who changed the flavor of ketchup in a way that made it universal. But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, like substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, ramping up the tomato solids.That made for an unusual and daring flavor.Worlds Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvellous thing.But it also meant that his ketchup wasnt as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude.Our conclusion was mainly this, Buchholz said.We felt that Worlds Best seemed to be more like a sauce.She was trying to be helpful. The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings.Six tasters sat around a large, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle.In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups, one filled with Heinz ketchup and one filled with Worlds Best.They would work along fourteen dimensions of flavor and texture, in accordance with the standard fifteen-point scale used by the food world.The flavor components would be divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by the nose.A very ripe peach, for example, tastes sweet but it also smells sweetwhich is a very different aspect of sweetness.Vinegar has a sour taste but also a pungency, a vapor that rises up the back of the nose and fills the mouth when you breathe out.To aid in the rating process, the tasters surrounded themselves with little bowls of sweet and sour and salty solutions, and portions of Contadina tomato paste, Hunts tomato sauce, and Campbells tomato juice, all of which represent different concentrations of tomato-ness. The worlds leading expert on ketchups early years is Andrew F.Smith, a substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy black hair.Smith is a scholar, trained as a political scientist, intent on bringing rigor to the world of food.When we met for lunch not long ago at the restaurant Savoy in SoHo (chosen because of the excellence of its hamburger and French fries, and because Savoy makes its own ketchupa dark, peppery, and viscous variety served in a white porcelain saucer), Smith was in the throes of examining the origins of the croissant for the upcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, of which he is the editor-in-chief.Was the croissant invented in 1683, by the Viennese, in celebration of their defeat of the invading Turks? Or in 1686, by the residents of Budapest, to celebrate their defeat of the Turks? Both explanations would explain its distinctive crescent shapesince it would make a certain cultural sense (particularly for the Viennese) to consecrate their battlefield triumphs in the form of pastry.But the only reference Smith could find to either story was in the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938.It just doesnt check out, he said, shaking his head wearily. Greg and Tom return to find the worst has happenedDavey can no longer see.With so much going on in his life, Greg doubts hell see Tom again. Top. There is another lesson in that household scene, though.Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes.That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his platetuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sproutsand he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar.He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate.And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once. I was especially concerned with screwing up the schtick when we had to interact with the faires Queen Elizabeth, she was the Queen, she knew everything. Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creationthe union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato.But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments.Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe, and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half.On one side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the amounts used.On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved with the application of culinary science.The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which add body to a sauce.But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch.The renegades argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting.They offered a money-back guarantee in the event of spoilage.They charged more for their product, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right.The benzoate ketchups disappeared.The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J.Heinz.

In the same aisle at Zabars that day two other demonstrations were going on, so that people were starting at one end with free chicken sausage, sampling a slice of prosciutto, and then pausing at the Worlds Best stand before heading for the cash register.They would look down at the array of open jars, and Wigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one of his ketchups, and hand it to them with a flourish.The ratio of tomato solids to liquid in Worlds Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick.Invariably, people would close their eyes, just for a moment, and do a subtle double take.Some of them would look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick up a jar.You know why you like it so much? he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed.Because youve been eating bad ketchup all Jim Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchupthe way Grey Poupon built a better mustardand the world will beat a path to your door.If only it were that easy. Cade offers Brian a place to stay and helps him find work, and the two men grow closer as they learn the good and the bad of the very different worlds they come from. Thea will do anything for Gwen and she uses it to her advantage whenever necessary. The heat between them is undeniable, but business &hellip; ContinuedRead more &rarr; Chasing the DreamBorn with a silver spoon in his mouth, Brian Paulson has lived a life of luxury and ease. Hes buried his mind and feelings in his legal work and isnt looking for another relationship. But when a mission puts them in close quarters once again, will Jacob continue to bury his feelings? Not if Jedryn has anything to say about it. Wait. When he needs a tax attorney to straighten out an error with the IRS, he ends up on the other side of the handsome Malcolms desk. 1.